Terror in America: One Man's Story, 1963-2005

By Leslie Herzberger

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 24, 2007
• ISBN: 9781469100081

Leslie Herzberger

The author was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1946. He served in the U.S. Army, then attended Columbia University School of International Affairs, and the Ph.D. Program in History at New York University. This book is part of the follow-up of the PH.D. Thesis Proposal that the author presented to New York University on December 24, 1980, and worked out as a private scholar the next 20 years. The work that went into the book spanned a period of around thirty years overall.

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Copyright © 2007 by Leslie Herzberger.

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Contents

BOOK I

INTRODUCTION

II     

III     

IV     

V     

VI     

BOOK II

BOOK III

I     

II     

III     

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX

BOOK IV

II     

III     

IV     

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

V     

BOOK V

SECTION I

SECTION II

APPENDIX IV

APPENDIX IV

APPENDIX V

I     

II     

III     

IV     

Civil Rights Groups

The Familial, and the Jewish Contingent In the Process

The Medical, Intellectual, And Academic Contingent In The Process

Who Are All These Bastards And Why Are They Still Kicking?

BOOK I

ANATOMY OF TERROR

INTRODUCTION

My story began at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration in the Fall of 1964, where as a Freshman I had hoped to become a restaurant magnate selling cheeseburgers and french fries all around the world.

I joined the United States Military in 1965 during the Vietnam War, after I nearly flunked out of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration because of Hotel Accounting. I was a scholarship student at Cornell, but I couldn’t handle Hotel Accounting. My palms would start to sweat each and every time I tried to deal with it, and even the most fundamental rudiments of accounting would not stay with me. My mind would refuse to accept it. You see, both my parents were accountants, and this was a generational type thing; I was a sort of closet rebel. It was a time for rebellion by an entire generation of my age group, against their own parents, and what they stood for. It just happened that I rebelled against Hotel Accounting. ‘My generation’ in 1964 was rebelling against the very order of the universe. But then I was not a rebel per se. I was a very ordinary person, into athletics, four different types of athletics, in high school. I scored Conventional on my Occupational Test at a much later time. It told me that I ‘might’ make a good accountant, a bank clerk, a mutual fund manager, a hotel manager, a marketing manager. I was conventional from the tip of my toes to the rounded end of my head. So while my generation was rebelling against the very order of the universe, I was rebelling against Hotel Accounting. Somewhere along the line, my fellows on the floor of my dormitory at Cornell had enough of me. So they invited me to wrestle this farmer boy from Upstate New York, because we were the same size, I suppose—with the only difference that ‘he’ was on the wrestling team! And I was a bad seed, as far as my fellows were concerned, I presume. So we wrestled, and the young farmer gentleman from Upstate New York separated my right shoulder. I was a right handed boy, he faked me to the left, and then slammed me on my right shoulder. I was out of commission for two months, even as my family was scrounging up every penny they could get their hands on to keep me there, even as they were paying for my sister’s education, in addition to her scholarship at Mount Holyoke College in Massachussets. Well, I either lost or were about to lose my scholarship, because I could not take notes, nor draw diagrams for two or more months. I nearly flunked out of school because of my inability to wrestle with debit and credit in the accounting class in the Hotel School. I also quit ROTC because I could not put an M-1 together with a separated shoulder, nor take notes, nor march up and down. But what seemed to have gotten my fellows so angry toward me was that I was not correct for Cornell at this time. I was not very smart, unlike them. I was extremely non-affluent, with barely ten dollars of spending money per week after all expenses were paid at school. And I was a Hotel Administration student at an academic power house in the mid-1960’s, because Cornell was where the middle class sent its brainy children should they fail the cut at Harvard and Princeton, and so on. It was Ivy League, but it was also State of New York connected in its Agriculture School and in its Labor School, so Cornell could not get on with absolute elitism as did its fellow Ivy League schools. So if you were smart, and you were on the way up, this was the school to give it a go. The Hotel School was an embarrasment to these fellows. It was a trade school at an elitist academic environment. At times I witnessed what could have been construed as homicidal antagonism by Liberal Arts types against Hotel students that thought they were ‘passing’. I witnessed one such incident, and I thanked my lucky stars that I was not the one ‘outed’ by them instead. I kept very quiet, and at the end of the show, I snuk out before it was too late. But I was outed at another time, and finished off by my fellows. So I returned to Brooklyn and then a month later joined the United States Army, with the clause written in that I would be sent to Europe for my first tour of duty, for the first 18 months. ‘Then’ they would have a shot at sending me wherever they wanted the remaining twelve months. The war in Vietnam was not a factor in my existence. Not then, not in 1968, not in 1974, not ever. It was ‘the’ leading factor in the lives of my fellows in my generation, however, the one defining shining moment of their lives. Those of us who had a problem with the war in Vietnam could be construed as the defining characteristics of this baby boomer generation. Those of us who had a problem with Hotel Accounting was my identity! It has ever been, it will ever be. You see, we were on two separate tracks. I was a card carrying conventional man; they were having problems with the shape of the universe. They were into love; ‘all you need is love’ was their metaphor. I was into hate. I volunteered for the military—and in the military I became an existentialist, which the progressive radical Herbert Marcuse described at this time as the most advanced form of decadent bourgeois Western individualism doomed in the eyes of history. Herbert Marcuse, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany was the guru for this Sixties generation. For Marcuse, as well as for the guiding lights of the this generation, someone like me was a fascist: one because I was not very smart; two, because I was a pushy refugee messing with the in-crowd; three, I was an existentialist when ‘everybody’ knows that existentialism leads to fascism, fascism leads to nazism, nazism leads to the Holocaust, the Holocaust is what Hitler perpetrated on the Jews; ergo, even after the Nazis were dead and gone, I was picking up the ashes; therefore, even though Hitler contributed directly to the death of the Jews in Europe and of fifty million dead overall, I was worse then Hitler; four, I was over six feet two, over two hundred pounds, and I was ‘over there’ during the Vietnam War—‘over there’ meaning being in the military. But for my fellows, that was the equivalent of actually being ‘in’ Vietnam, which I never was. In 1967, I was sent to Ft. Bliss, Texas instead, after my tour of duty in Athens, Greece with the U.S. Military was finished. I returned to Brooklyn College in January 1968 with an Honorable Discharge, with an early out to return to school. At the time, I had a deal with the Dean of the Hotel School at Cornell that I would be let back in to finish Cornell. Instead, I chose to go to Brooklyn College to study political science, history, psychology and philosophy. You see, it did not cost anything, the profesors were good, and the students were Jewish, as far as I knew from 1964—and so was I! I had enough of Christian farm boys from the South in the military. I wanted to sink back in and disappear for a couple of years. But nothing was further from the minds of this fundamentalist trash that inherited Brooklyn and Brooklyn College by 1968. ‘They’ had just begun. They were on the warpath in 1968, just as the baby boomer generation from the ranks of the brainy: upwardly mobile ethnics were at Cornell in 1964-1965. And just as I was inquisited at Cornell in 1964 for being incorrect, I was inquisited at Brooklyn College in 1968 as incorrect. The sad part of it was that in the U.S. Military too, I was inquisited as utterly incorrect. In this country, I kept coming up in the faces of those who were utterly correct—and getting the shit kicked out of me for just this fact. My hubris, their nemesis.

II     

= =

In the beginning, there was the set-up by the United States Military, and the Jews.

I served in the United States Military from 1965 to 1968. By 1966, I was already their patsy. I was already gone, as far as the United States Military was concerned. By 1966, for the United States Military, I was already dead. Their intelligence branches merely had to fill in the blanks—any which way they wanted. They made me their putz for life. And they forgot to tell me about it. You see, I had ‘no need to know’. I was going to be used by them, abused by them, and when they were through, I was going to get assasinated by them. God bless their Irish German Christian hearts, because somebody has to.

II

My hubris in the United States Military was that I was going to leave them the first chance I got, some time after they sent me to Athens, Greece. In the late Fall of 1965, I decided to go AWOL permanently and leave for Israel. I was stationed with the U.S. Military near Athens, Greece. It was at this time that President Johnson kicked the war in Vietnam into gear via the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The buildup in Vietnam followed in the Fall of 1965. The truth was that my problem with the United States Military had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam. That was ‘their’ problem! ‘That’ was the problem of the in-crowd in Washington D.C. and the upwardly mobile affluent and soon to be affluent ‘yuppies’ on the way up, and those whiz kids already up there in the Sixties. I was a rebel against Hotel Accounting. I had no stake in the system. I was a refugee. I was totally out of it—a nowhere man. Yet somehow I found myself responsible for it all. In the military, I had betrayed them in a time of war, and ‘they’ were going to get even for that, if it took them the next quarter of a century to do so. Yet nothing was further from the truth. From where I was, there was ‘no’ Vietnam. We did not discuss it. We did not worry over it. We did not read about it. I for one volunteered for infantry school, even though the military wanted to send me to clerk school. So help me, does that sound like a man that was crying into his shirt sleeve at the horror of it all? I was color blind! They would not have sent me to infantry school if I had told them that, so I did not tell them about that. It had nothing to do with Vietnam. And it was not a war! It was a ‘police action’, like all the other police actions the United States military pulled the last thrity years. But I am getting ahead of myself here a bit. For the U.S. military, the fact that I was a refugee and that I chose to leave for Israel, even though I never made it to the door, was construed by them, voluntarily, one would presume—since they were probably looking for a putz like me to use and abuse—voluntarily construed by them as treason on my part. After all, they were so good to me here in America, and I chose to betray their trust in me. God bless you Irish German Christian gentleman, because somebody has to.

As a refugee in the United States from Eastern Europe in 1956, my action was construed by them as treason, one would imagine. At least a charge of treason, once given, would give them the right to do what they will with me the next 40 years. So why not? Who was going to defend me? ‘Who’ was going to defend me? Even my family thought of me as a traitor to something—though not necessarily the same as the U. S. military, but a traitor nevertheless. So did my co-religionists, the Jews. So did my generation—the yuppie upwardly mobile baby boomers. There was nobody left to defend me. And I was viewed as the aggressor against ‘them’. This was the perfect set up. The military could pull any shenanigans they wanted and ‘nobody’ would interfere!

III     

I have been the subject of an Inquisition in America for 42 years—since the assasination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, in November, 1963. For me, that has meant torture in America for three decades now. It has meant psychological terror from 1964-1981, and both psychological terror and physical torture since April 1, 1981. It is now 1997. The torture continues unabated.

My time of troubles in Amerika began right after the assasination of John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. Up to 1963, things seemed to have sputtered forward for me in America. I was in the Boy Scouts from the age of ten to eighteen. I did all of that boy scout stuff real well. I went to summer boy scout camp each summer, and stayed longer then anybody else. It was like boot camp in the military, and I took several runs at it each summer. The normal stay was two weeks. I stayed two months. I did hiking, camping, shooting, canoing swimming, archery, and I did all that in the mountains. When I say swimming, I swam two miles in the lake and came in first—that kind of swimming; and hiking ten mile hikes up hill and downhill. So that military boot camp was not all that difficult for me afterwards. I went canoing down the rapids of the Delaware River and loved every minute of it. They had to forbid me to repeat it all summer, that was the only way they could keep me away. I played four varsity sports in High School, a four letter man. I did that by playing basketball in Junior High School, then swimming and tennis in High School, then after I quit the swimming team, I replaced it with the soccer team. I was most valuable player on my tennis team in my senior year in high school, and athlete of the month for all sports in the month of April in 1964, just prior to graduation. And I was very good in Political Science and kind of in History in High School and in Junior High School. Especially in international affairs. It came easy for me. Nothing else did, but those subjects did. Since I was born in Eastern Europe, and came over at the age of ten, those subjects were second nature to me, in the sense that history confronted me in the face and I was forced to listen to it a bit more then anybody else normally would, if merely by osmosis. I spoke the language of the country of my birth, Hungary, and I was familiar with the capitol, Budapest, where I was born and where I grew up from the age of six to ten. I grew up Right in the center of Budapest, next to the Chain Bridge, where they used to throw the Jews into the icy Danube River in 1944-1945 during the Nazi episode in Hungarian history. We came over at the height of the cold war, and I was familiar with the capitol of a communist country and spoke its language, a country that together with Poland will become instrumental in taking the Soviet Bloc apart some years later. You might say those two countries were the weak link in the armor of Soviet bloc communism.

II

In the late Fall, early Spring of 1964, just after the assasination of President Kennedy in November 1963, my parents took me to the New York University Medical School Hospital, where they gave me a whole battery of tests, including the Rorscharch Ink Blot Tests and a whole series of others. They were given by a prominent looking dark haired Jewish female psychologist. I remember her as sophisticated and severe; a real dominant and smart Polish Russian Jewess, rather tall and bony. And that was that. Afterwards, in Brooklyn, this retired psychologist lady was reccomended to me and I visited her once a week for some weeks. She lived somewhere around the Subway stop of Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn, on the Coney Avenue line. I would get on the Subway at my stop on Avenue U and East 16th street and get off at Newkirk Avenue. She lived in a staid, victorian type dusty two story one family private house near there. She was dumpy, non-obsessive, non-Germanic. She was Jewish, but just the opposite from that severe Jewess at NYU. We talked aimlessly and then she reccomended to me that I get out of the United States and go to Europe. This at age 18 in the Spring of 1964. And that was that. It meant about as much to me as what happened nearly two decades later, when my Polish Jewish landlord on the Upper West Side of New York City returned from a visit to Israel around April 1, 1981, and reccomended to me in no uncertain terms to disappear, go to Europe for six months. Your life is in danger. I asked my landlord in 1981 who told him? He answered, Sort of the police. It did not mean anything to me then in 1981 in NYC and it did not mean anything to me in 1964, in Brooklyn, New York. But I believe they knew exactly what they were talking about in both instance. I was going to get kidnapped in 1964 in Brooklyn, New York by the United States Government, and I was going to get kidnapped after April 1, 1981 in New York City, on the Upper West Side by the United States Government. In 1981, it happened one day after the assasination on President Ronald Reagan went down on March 29, 1981; the physical terror by the U.S. Government began for me on April 1, 1981. In 1964, in the Spring of that year, it happened after the assasination of President John F. Kennedy. Why me?

I was born in Budapest, Hungary on April 21, 1946, and I spoke its language and I was familiar with its terrain, including its capitol, Budapest. Budapest was the key to untangling the Soviet Bloc. Goulash communism was merely one of the manifestations. The willingness of the people to rise up and take on the Soviet military in 1956 was indication that they might do it again, directly, but even more so, indirectly, ‘can-opener’ style, step by clever step, if only the gambit was worked well enough from Langley, Virginia by the high command (at the CIA) of America’s Cold War with the Soviets around the world after World War II. This high command took direct control after the assasination of President John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. The secret government was on the offensive. The Cold War was put into gear. I was avilable to be drafted as a soldier. I had the skills. I was good in military skills. I was good in politics and history, especially in current events, and all the people, especially my teachers knew it in my class. I was good at nothing else but sports and that, but that I was good at. Precocious might be a better term. I spoke about China and her six hundred million people in Junior High School in a class debate on how you cannot disregard such numbers no matter what. I dont know why I said it, but I remember hearing myself saying that, and it stuck with me. I spoke Hungarian flawlessly. I knew the center of Budapest. I walked its streets. I had fond memories of the place. I fit in there, should it be necessary, and I might not even get noticed. I was young. I had no apparent baggage to carry around with me. And by the Spring of 1964, through the ‘spontaneous’ efforts of my parents, they had my total psychological psychiatric profile on record, validated, doublechecked, computer designed, verified by the best psychologist in New York that money can buy at the gowing rate, so to speak. They knew exactly who and what they were about to kidnap, and just how to do it.

At this point, I was offered a position in the entering class at West Point by the Jewish individual that owned the two family house we lived in at 2152 East 23rd street in Brooklyn, New York—by a Judge Goldstein. He lived upstairs, we lived downstairs. Judge Goldstein was an Assemblyman from Brooklyn, and after he asked me, I helped get him elected by passing out fliers just before election in 1964. Now I did not do anything really. He was a shooin, and he did not need me passing out fliers. But he asked, I did, and I got my fellows to help. They were Jewish, and they did not want to do it, so I paid them to do it, and told others that I got them to volunteer. At this time I was a kitchenman each Saturday—for ten-fifteen hours—on Long Island, at Leonard’s Catering in Great Neck, New York, and used the money Sundays to take tennis lessons. I used that money to get my friends to help. In return, Judge Noah Goldstein offered me an appointment to West Point. He said that if I chose to go there, he could get the nomination from New York for me. I went to the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration instead—in Ithaca, New York. Judge Goldstein brought up the subject of West Point, not me. He was 150% Jewish, and here he was peddling West Point to another Jew—and to a refugee Jew at that. Amazing!

Judge Noah Goldstein had a thin moustache, and slicked down dark hair, greasy, and he said he graduated from St. John’s University Law School, I believe. That is the Law School that CIA Director William Casey graduated from. (And also Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown under President Clinton, who was the head of the Democratic Party National Committee when Clinton got elected. Brown was a lobbyist for the dictator Duvalier in Haiti before that. Brown’s law partner handled the public relations folio for the BCCI banking concern in America, at the rate of $500,000 dollars per year. All three had heavy duty political grease attached to their persona, and dirt. Real political dirt.) Apparently the NYC power structure born of World War II from the Irish Jewish ranks in NYC graduated from St Johns and Fordham Law Schools. Mario Cuomo graduated from these, and Mayor Abraham Beame of New York did too. Ethnic upwardly mobile sharpshooters and spooks used these schools as finishing schools. Both law schools belong to Jesuit Universities in New York. Right wing Jews find these schools and these environments congenial. It would make Judge Goldstein a right wing Jew, from his thin moustache to his slicked down hair. He might have called himself a Democrat, but that was before one had to account for oneself to anybody besides one’s tax collector. Goldstein was a Democrat the same way Mayor Kosch in the 1980’s was a Democrat in New York City. These types are Jewish fascists!

So I went to Cornell University, and I was tripped up there in a matter of weeks and months. I returned home, and then joined the U.S. Military in order to go to Europe, ostensibly to get away—just as that retired psychologist lady reccommeded to me in 1964, a year earlier. Unfortunately, by early 1965, it was too late for me to get away. I belonged to ‘them’. There was no longer an exit for me, a way out. I never had a chance, although I did not have the slightest inkling then, nor later. They kidnapped me thirty two years ago, and never let go.

III

First however, they gave it a wet run. I really was kidnapped in Brooklyn, on the streets. One day in the early Spring of 1964, these seven Italians from my (Sheepshead Bay) High School, some of whom were in my gym class, closed in around me and my pals as we were walking along Nostrand Avenue from school to home after 3 o’clock, and told me in so many words that I now belonged to them. If I resisted, they would beat me up. And then they stayed with me all the way home, in a semi-circle. They lived around East 14th to East 16th street near the Subway station on Avenue U, next to the Police Station on East 15 street and Avenue U. That is where the Italians lived. And these were junior Mafioso, practicing for the big time. Each day I would come out of Sheepshead Bay High School, and they would be waiting for me. They then hooked on to me and threatened to beat me to a pulp if a resisted even slightly. When they thought they had me totally pacified, the smallest, the leader, would challenge me to a fight right there, on the street. I took him up on it, at which time his fellows closed in on me and said that I would have to fight all seven of them at once. The most brazen of these seven was a weasel named Alexander. That name filled me with terror, because this guy was crazy, ‘confirmed normal crazy’, and was willing to use his crazy to that end. Then there was the big guy, the strong arm punk, who remained silent, there for use at any moment. So I would walk with my fellows, my friend Steven Levine and some others, and the Italians would close in on me, even as I walked with my Jewish buddies. I asked my Jewish friends if they would help, and they all refused. They simply would not get involved, including my best friend Steven Levine. He too went to Cornell University with me, but after that Spring, I chose not to room with him at Cornell University. Steve’s half brother was Sandy Koufax, the L.A. Dodger pitcher. Steve’s father died of a pre-mature heart attack while a hot shot lawyer for Mayor Fiorello Laguardia, I believe. After his father’s death, the family lived in financial straights, close to where I lived, but strictly solid middle class. A very smart boy, he went to the Liberal Arts School at Cornell and I believe he became a psychologist, a doctor at any rate, and now lives somewhere in New Jersey. The point is, I was being mugged in plain sight of these fellows and nobody was going to lift a finger. I went to the Dean of Students at Sheepshead Bay High School, a Jew, my former swim team coach, the team that I quit to join soccer in my junior year in High School. The man said he was not interested—even as these punks were standing outside his window waiting for me, by the entrance. I went to the police station on East 15th Street and Avenue U, my only contact with the NYC police in my entire socialization process in America, and a sergeant at the desk told me to forget about it, to my face, without missing a beat. I told my mother about it, and for the first of many many many times in the next thirty years, the lady informed me that it was a misperception! That I must have done something to warrant it, to bring it on me. End of discussion. So I spent the last Semester of my senior year sneaking out of High School through the back entrance because the threat was there to beat me to a pulp if I came out the front exit. And there was no reason for it that I could determine outside that I was good in gym and maybe one was jealous of that. No reason was ever given! And none has been given the last thirty years for the U.S. Government terror for me that was to follow. What amazed me was how professionally these Italians kidnapped me, and how impeccably they kept it up for half a year, through group dynamics ‘by the numbers’. And nobody would help—not even my parents, who turned it around and threw it in my face. Not my Jewish buddies. Not the legitimately constituted (School) authorities. Not the NYC police—the NYPD. Nobody cared, nobody listened. And I was blamed for being responsible for it all. It was the exact approach the U.S. Government torturers were going to pursue the next thirty years against me—group dynamics by the numbers and all. The mix of participants in 1964 included Right wing Jews in there, the West Point-United States Military nexus, and the legitimately constituted New York City authorities, including the New York City police—in a microcosm. In 1964, in that live fire excercise for me, I did not break the set-up. I did not run for it. I did not fight back. I accepted the atrocity in a microcosm. I accepted their terror! And even in a sense I blamed myself for it. If that was what they were looking for, I was the perfect putz for them.

IV     

Let me give my qualifications for all of this: I am a Jewish immigrant from Communist Hungary at the age of ten, in 1956 That means I have absolutely no legal protection in America, except what the U.S. Government chooses to grant me. It has granted me absolutely none the last thirty years. In my case, the U.S. Government has violated ‘every’ principle imbedded in the Constitution, including murder, mayhem, terror and torture. I would be classified as a conservative, because I view the individual as the fundamental building block of society, not the group. I have positive antipathies against group processes—so much so that I became an existentialist in the U.S. Military, in which I served from 1965 to 1968, before returning to college. I don’t have a Left wing bone in my body. I also have trouble with authority; there seems to have been severe conflict between my intellectual father, and my disposition toward pragmatic non-intellectual occupations; I have been called along the way a glorified cook, and a New York taxi driver. I have been advised by a very dear relative to open up a frankfurter stand on a corner